Baldur’s Gate 3 is my first foray into the RPG series, a leap I’m taking primarily because I need to regularly play and write about new games for my job. The game sounds interesting to me on its face – Baldur’s Gate 3 is a role-playing video game incorporating turn-based combat with fifth-edition D&D rules, and is set in a D&D campaign setting. I’m a casual D&D player at best, and my experience with the tabletop game is limited to a dozen 𒐪sessions of a homebrew Avatar: The Last Airbender campaign my friend ran for us. My knowledge of spells is limited, and we skip a lot of the mechanics that hardcore players might get in the weeds with in favour of ease of entry, because almost all of us were new pla🉐yers when we first started the campaign.
Baldur’s Gate 3 does not do this. Instead, it’s catered to players who really, really like Dungeons & Dragons and are familiar with the 5e ruleꦑset. Its story so far has been engaging enough that I’m still on the ride, but I’ve found myself struggling with the amount of information I need to process and the sheer number of actions I could take at any one time. That freedom is par for the course when it comes to D&D, and is one of the things I enjoy so much about the game. Don’t like the way someone is talking to you? You can be really passive-aggressive, start a fight with them, or pickpocket them when their back is turned as a petty sort of revenge. Want to cross a chasm? You can just jump! But that’s not an action tied to a button, you have to choose it from a huge series of wheels that allow you to do pretty much anything, and there are so many options that I don’t even know where to start looking.
That freedom is almost stressful when you put it into a video game. There’s no set path and no one way to do things, so I’m constantly freaking out about how my actions will impact the ending I get, because I know I don’t have an extremely forgiving Dungeon Master best friend who has already anticipated that my party will take the most chaotic, least informed route possible and adjusted the campaign so we don&r🐟squo;t end up with the worst possible outcome. I just have whatever this game has allowed for me, and there are established consequences for my stupid actions. I want to win, and having so much freedom makes me feel like I won’t.
It’s not just the freedom, even levelling up my character stresses me out. I made a half-orc Sorceror for my first playthrough because I like magic but also wanted to roleplay as the worst, most toxic version of myself – well-intentioned, but with possibly too many strong feelings and anger issues. God help me, I did not anti𓂃cipate how many spells I would have to choose from. I’m rusty on my D&D as my group has since shifted to running one-shots of different games, and it’s been a while since I’ve had to level a character or pick spells to learn. Every time my character levels up, I find myself overwhelmed by the sheer number ꦺof things I have to change in my build, and then I have to do that for every character in my party. I don’t have to worry about tracking stat increases, but I’m choosing new spells, swapping lower-level ones for higher-level ones, and having to figure out how to use new mechanics for every companion I’ve picked up over the game. My tiny walnut brain simply cannot do all these classes justice all at once – I’ve only ever played a .
And my god, the inventory management. I’m a gamer, so my first instinct is to pick up every book, every plate, and every piece of cheese to sell later, but I am thoroughly overwhelmed by the number of things in my inventory now. It’s easy to keep track of things when you have to manually input them, whether that be writing it in your character sheet by hand or typing it in, as I usually do. I looked at my inventory after four hours of playtime and immediately felt nauseous. I had so much equipment that, logically, I would redistribute to my party according to what they would utilise best, but I’m not capable of holding all of their proficiencies and subclasses in my head. I can look at a piece of armour I looted and it’ll tell me the character currently holding it doesn’t have the required proficiencies, but not who does have proficiency to use it b✃est. A more seasoned D&D player might be able to decide who could use that armour best without having to flip through a rulebook, but I can’t, especially not for this many characters.
These might be growing pains that ease once I get more stuck into gameplay, and I bet they’ll be quickly alleviated when I start playing with friends in multiplayer mode because I won’t be wrangling so many different character sheets and inventories at once. But right now, playing in single-player is making me feel like I might need to keep the Dungeons & Dragons Player Handbook open beside me at all times, and I’m not a huge fan of having to do homework to play a video game. Baldur’s Gate 3 does give you tips on what the important things are so you can focus on them, but a game that’s so deeply entwined with roleplaying mechanics will inevitably turn newer players away if it doesn’t ease them into the gameplay. Once again, being a filthy casual has meant I’m stuck trying to learn what seems to come naturally to every other player, and that kind of sucks. Baldur’s Gate isn’t made for casuals, it seems, and that’s fine – I’m just going to have ꦫto hope the story keeps me playing for the foreseeable future.